


Living With a Lingering Soul

by KatastrophicTodd



Series: Pretend Till It Doesn't Hurt [3]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Depression, Family Feels, Gen, Underage Smoking, chosen family, mentioned attempted suicide, this is sad but hopeful?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:34:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24867661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KatastrophicTodd/pseuds/KatastrophicTodd
Summary: “I love you, son.” He whispered. A brittle thing like a bird’s bone.“That’s not enough,” Jason said. He’d been hurt until he learned that, again and again.Love wasn’t meant to be brittle.~ Wherein Jason comes home.
Relationships: Alfred Pennyworth & Jason Todd, Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne, Jason Todd & Damian Wayne
Series: Pretend Till It Doesn't Hurt [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/977115
Comments: 74
Kudos: 487





	Living With a Lingering Soul

**Author's Note:**

> hello!!!
> 
> this is not beta read, i'm afraid, so bear with me :)
> 
> title from "Paint" by The Paper Kites
> 
> hope you enjoy

Jason often wondered when the cold became comfort, and happiness began to hurt.

Once upon a lifetime, Jason sat on a gargoyle. With frostbitten thighs, he could feel his blue lips and the stiffness of his fingers when he struggled to keep the cigarette between them. The night had been bad, so bad that Bruce had lashed out. He told Jason he was not his father.

Now, his pixie boots dangled at each side of the stone creature.

Jason bit the insides of his lips to stop them from quivering. He pondered going back to the manor, but he found that his muscles didn't respond. He wondered if he would fall if he tried to get off the gargoyle. His fingers were so stiff that he may not be able to pull the trigger of the grapple gun.

 _I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams_. Jason thought often of that quote. Every time the sadness spread and kept his ribcage in a clenched fist. Every time he wondered how it used to feel to be happy.

He’d heard somewhere that birds had brittle bones. That’s what he thought of on that gargoyle. He was a bird about to break.

The problem wasn't how he felt, the problem was _how much_. Since he was a kid, he felt too much, or so his mom said. If he was happy, he would beam like the sun, cheeks hurting because of his smile and a headache already forming due to heated laughter. If he was sad his heart would tear in half. He soon learned that wasn't normal, he soon learned to tone it down. The crackling energy of his feelings snaking beneath his skin while he tried to mask it before his parents.

It felt like covering a tear on a pipe with the palm of his hand. He pressed and pressed so it wouldn't leak, but the drops fell in a constant rhythm. He knew they would end up poisoning him, like the ceiling in the kitchen when it cracked and darkened the night the upstairs neighbor left the faucet open. He knew he'd crack and fall slowly, piece by tiny piece. He did his best to cover it, like Willis did the ceiling, even though they all knew the fungus and darkness spread below.

Jason soon forgot how it felt to feel fully. He was bent on keeping the paint clean. Until his heart broke, and the pipe broke. The paint flaked and the ceiling cracked, and the sadness spread like a sickness and Jason wished he had never felt at all.

It flooded every nook and cranny, cold and salty, and he soon was under water. He heard and saw and felt and moved as if he was under water. A slow, silent world. A lonely world.

Until he became accustomed to the salt and dullness and he did not remember a before.

So, in that gargoyle, after the sadness flooded drowning him, he stayed in the cold. He let the freezing Gotham air caress his face, where the warmth of a single tear threatened to melt him whole. The stillness and the bite felt better than the tide inside his chest.

He stayed very still, cigarette consuming fast with each gust of wind, until he felt the rictus in his muscles and the numbness in his fingertips when they touched his thigh. The cigarette burned through the filter and fell into the abyss. Jason was so high he could barely see the streetlights.

In the cold and stillness, only listening to the city live and die, Jason felt solace like one would in touching of a shard of ice: marveling at that first quiet second before the skin began to burn. Only the burn didn’t come, the cold stilled the tide and Jason took in a shivering breath, chest finally filling with air.

Jason breathed. He breathed in the night and the fumes and the city’s decay and contemplated the fall from his high perch. _Quietus_.

His comm cracked to life and Alfred’s voice made it to him. A crack in the ice.

“Master Jason, we would appreciate if you could come back home hastily,” the gentle butler spoke. “The cold is most unmerciful tonight.”

ᴥ

The air was too hot when he arrived. Gotham always worked in the extremes. The freshly cut grass in the Manor’s grounds reminded Jason of hot summer afternoons reading in Alfred’s garden, jumping the meticulously trimmed bushes with an imaginary rapier in hand. Alfred’s soft smile and worn hands, Bruce’s shadow lengthening before him where he stood just outside the garden’s French doors.

The air was hot and there were clouds on the horizon.

He had climbed the door on the iron fence, took him less than a minute. Jason was aware of the dozen cameras guarding the doors from different angles and hidden spots. They let him climb.

Instead of walking the road to the fountain and the main entrance behind it, he turned left and walked the grounds. He ignored the silhouettes on the windows, their eyes trailing after him. Later, Jason would find it funny that being the one undead, the live ones seemed to be the ones to haunt.

His boots made the way through the grounds for some long minutes, Jason only stopping to pluck a lonely daisy from the ground. He twirled it between two fingers, squinting at the sun. The others must have informed Bruce already, and the sun would be out still when he arrived.

He stopped at the peak of a little hill, barely more than a slope. He remembered it bigger, somehow. Then again, he had been far tinier the last time he came. He sat on the descending side and lay back, tucking the flower behind his right ear. He basked in the sun; a habit developed back at the Kent’s farm. The warmth on his skin calming the writhing thing underneath.

He thought he might be nervous, that his pulse would quicken and his will falter. Instead, he felt strangely calm. The inevitability of this meeting erasing the doubt.

Jason lit a cigarette and waited for Bruce to come.

ᴥ

Bruce remembered that cold night in Crime Alley. He remembered the frightening calm when he visited the place where his parents were murdered all those years ago. Now Dick was gone, and Bruce was left to face all his failures.

It had been his fault. No matter what Alfred said, or his therapist, or his friends. Bruce was scared that day at the cinema and asked to leave. That got his parents dead. Dick left, like every good thing in his life and took with him all the progress Bruce had made beside him, caring for him, raising and protecting.

Alfred kept giving him these looks, like the ones just before he sent him to therapy when he was nine. Alfred was the only thing that remained, and Bruce was failing him too. He saw the weary glances and the worried man who did his best to keep Bruce alive despite his best efforts to get hurt. To feel something other than the gaping void that grew each day.

A part of Bruce wondered if he should feel horrified at feeling nothing on the anniversary of his parents’ death, staring at the exact spot on the ground where he had kneeled between them and let the thick blood soak his pants.

Bruce turned around and made his way back to the batmobile, intent on doing another couple of rounds before heading back to Old Gotham. Alfred would want him to return a bit early, Bruce knew, because even if the old man didn’t tell him, Bruce saw how he worried his ward might do something foolish that night of the year. Like he’d done at nine, when he had cut his wrists open.

Bruce clenched his teeth and touched the place in his forearm where, underneath the Kevlar, the scar was. Almost imperceptible after all those years if you didn’t know what to look for. Alfred always looked at it if it was on sight.

Bruce would just feel the bottomless guilt consume him every time it happened. Just another reminder of his failure at being a good son to Alfred. He only ever brought him pain and worry. And just when the dark growing feeling was rearing its ugly head, Bruce noticed the tires of the batmobile missing. The shock was enough to distract him from the thought in his head.

He froze in place, taking everything in. And then he heard a quiet voice:

“ _Fuck_.”

Bruce raised his eyebrows intrigued and went to look at the stealthy stealer.

Bruce’s thoughts came to halt when he saw the kid. _Tiny_ , was all he could think when he took in the sight. He was very short and way too thin. Bruce cringed. He could spy a cigarette pack inside the kid’s hoodie’s pocket, probably to help with the nerves and starvation.

He cleared his throat and the kid turned like a feral animal. Fight or flight response. Bruce could barely finish a sentence when the kid hit him with the tire-iron. _Hard_. He’d probably put all his weight behind that blow.

 _Hnn_.

The kid had balls. Not only was he hitting the city’s vigilante, but he was incredibly brave. Bruce had seen the utter terror in those eyes even when he hit him. That kid had seen some terrible things. A cold shiver made his way down Bruce’s spine at the thought. Crime Alley had fame for being incredibly unforgiving for children.

He chased after the kid, caught him two blocks away. He was also incredibly fast.

 _Hnn_.

The kid thrusted and clawed at the lower half of Bruce’s face in panic. Bruce just stayed still and endured until the fight left him. Until the kid sagged in his grip and casted his defeated eyes down. He looked ready to faint.

The kid was panting. Bruce could feel his thundering heart where his hands held him under the armpits even through the gauntlets. His lip was quivering, and Bruce could tell he was fighting hard the urge to cry.

A feisty thing indeed.

He spewed some very elaborate insults. Bruce fought the desire to laugh. Something softened in him, looking at that struggling kid who was brave enough to steal from Batman. He thought about Dick and how healthy he’d been when he took him in. the muscle he had from the gymnastics. His heart clenched, looking at the scrawny kid in front of him, bags under his eyes and dirty clothes.

“Are you hungry?” He asked.

ᴥ

Bruce hadn’t quite stopped seeing Jason as that kid in the Alley, scared but ready to fight. He saw him in the way he lashed out when he came back, asking from Bruce to show he loved him. In the way those eyes showed Bruce his broken heart when Jason understood that Bruce could never kill.

He saw him in the guarded look he bestowed upon his family, as if he was waiting for them to turn against him. And in the way his eyes shone when he talked to Alfred in the kitchen, unaware of Bruce’s presence at the door.

The more he tried to hide it, to hide himself, the more Bruce saw him.

It was a painful thing, the knowledge that his son would hide from him. But not nearly as painful and seeing him, heart bleeding and defeated, telling them he couldn’t take it anymore. Seeing him go, hand in hand with Talia. Seeing him flinch at Bruce, running away from him because he couldn’t be happy around him.

What Bruce felt wasn’t the gaping void this time, it was a sick and suffocating feeling eating at his very core every time he relived the events of that day.

The Manor had been quiet and tense since Jason left, as if his absence stifled any happiness. Only the ones present in the cave that night knew about it. Probably Damian, too. The youngest had been absent those past months, evading Bruce’s questions and disappearing every other week.

Bruce often wondered if Damian wished he could have left with Talia and Jason.

Dick’s message made Bruce freeze.

_Jason’s here._

He waited a couple of seconds for Dick to explain, but he didn’t.

_In the Manor?_

_Yes. In the grounds._

He was already cancelling all of his meetings and picking up his jacket.

_Did he say anything?_

_No, he didn’t come in. He’s just lying in the grass._

A sharp stab of pain went through Bruce’s heart. Images of Jason, just a kid, lying in the grass and humming tunes with Alfred. Basking in the sun like a cat, wrinkling his nose in displeasure when Bruce’s shadow covered his face.

Jason laughing with mirth when Bruce tickled his sides in retaliation for Jason getting wisps of grass in his hair. Alfred a few feet apart, tending to the bushes and the garden trees. Jason finally climbing into Bruce’s lap and allowing him to circle his small body with his arms. Bruce feeling the sun burning his scalp but not wanting the moment to end. Burrowing his nose in Jason’s curly hair while the kid talked about school projects, making bit gestures with his tiny arms.

It was a hot day in Gotham, making Bruce feel clammy as he climbed into his sports car. Fortunately, it was one of the fast ones. Bruce was sure he would hear from the GCPD about fines for driving over the speed limit.

His son was home. And he was waiting.

Bruce didn’t know if he was ready for whatever was to come, not after how he had neglected his son. Not after he had made him fear him. But he would be damned if he failed Jason again. His son was home, and he was there for a reason.

Snapshots of a whole life passed through Bruce’s eyes: the pain and the laughter, the rage and the quiet nights feeling thigh against his own while sitting in a rooftop. All the school functions and the petty fights. The words he said and made Jason smile, and the words that made him hate him.

Bruce had never been a good father, but Jason excelled as a son.

Jason was home, and Bruce decided he would always come for his child.

ᴥ

It was already raining when Jason heard Bruce’s steps on the wet, muddy ground. The raindrops had already soaked his clothes and ruined his pack of cigarettes, discarded somewhere near his right knee. The rain was hot, and Jason felt the ground beneath him giving under his bulk, as if the earth was trying to get him back six feet under.

Jason’s hair was plastered to his face and the smell of petrichor filled his lungs. Bruce’s steps halted a few inches away from his face.

Jason looked up, shielding his eyes with one hand. He was reminded of a very similar situation, a lifetime ago, when Bruce would block the sunlight and they would joke and laugh. Jason wondered if Bruce still saw his dead son when he looked at him.

Bruce’s suit was wet, and his designer shoes were surely ruined now that they were caked with mud. A lightning crossed the sky, casting shadows on Bruce’s face. Jason waited.

Bruce cleared his throat and sat beside Jason, the muddy earth moving underneath. Jason turned his head around and looked at the dark grey clouds. He heard the thunder. He felt Bruce’s eyes trained on his face, like they always did years ago, both lying in the evening sun. He saw Bruce’s fist clench around a handful of dirt. Jason remember then how it felt to claw out of his grave in the rain, breathing in mud and foul air. He remembered being confused and desperate.

“You came back,” Bruce said, voice barely a whisper just before another lightning crossed the sky.

Jason let out a humorless laugh, raindrops getting in his mouth.

“I didn’t come for you,” he said, and there was no malice behind it. Only the truth.

Bruce remained silent, eyes still on his face.

“I came for Damian,” Jason added.

“For Damian?”

Jason gulped. Damian hadn’t told them, then. That was alright.

“Damian found me,” Jason said to the cloudy sky, hoping the rain would mask the tears. “Half dead.”

Bruce took a sharp breath.

“He’s been living with me these past months,” Jason tried not to rub his pointer and middle finger against each other, as he always did as a child. “Been helping me get well.”

“Are you okay?” Bruce asked. He sounded choked up.

“I don’t know,” Jason shrugged. “But I’m here to stay.”

He knew Bruce read between the lines. Jason was coming to the Manor, and there was nothing Bruce could say about that.

“Okay,” Bruce said, and it sounded so much like the Bruce Jason remembered in his dreams of sunny days and boundless laughter. Sadder, maybe. A bit more broken, perhaps.

“I want a room close to his.”

“Alright.”

There was nothing else Jason wanted to say. He wasn’t doing Bruce’s work for him. Not this time.

“Jason, I…” Bruce started. Jason doubted he knew where he was going with that sentence.

He turned around and locked eyes with Bruce, both of them taking in a deep breath.

Jason hated how much he loved him still, how much he wanted Bruce to love him back. Bruce clenched his jaw and swallowed, looking down at his fist clenched around the dirt.

“I love you, son.” He whispered. A brittle thing like a bird’s bone.

“That’s not enough,” Jason said. He’d been hurt until he learned that, again and again.

Love wasn’t meant to be brittle. He knew the love he had for Damian was as strong and fierce as the tides. The love he had for Talia as sure and present as the ground beneath his feet, growing and reciprocated in spite of the secrets between them. The love he felt for Alfred, as freeing and encouraging as the wind through a bird’s feathers.

Jason couldn’t afford a love that would break as soon as he faltered.

Bruce nodded, pursing his lips. Jason wondered if he was also letting raindrops mask his tears and suppressed the urge to hold Bruce’s hand. To seek a meeting point.

“You love Damian,” Bruce said, more a declaration than a question.

“Yes,” he said with a smile.

For a moment, the writhing thing under paper-thin skin stilled, and Jason breathed in the petrichor and the rain and his heart threatened to burst.

Jason had always felt too much, but he guessed that was just perfect because Damian needed that and more. His little brother drinking in Jason’s love and flourishing and brightening thanks to it. So, Jason was fined with his bursting heart and the breakable skin, because they meant Damian was growing strong and happy and not cutting himself on his sharp edges anymore.

“Then stay,” Bruce said, voice strained.

And Jason thought that was all. A short conversation with more things unsaid than said, but lacking violence and fists and slit throats. And then:

“I’m sorry,” Bruce said. “About everything.”

And it wasn’t enough, not by a long shot. Four words couldn’t cover years of mistakes. But Jason nodded either way because he still loved Bruce and knew he was trying. But it wasn’t enough, and Bruce knew it just by looking at his face.

Jason stood up and picked up the soaked-up cigarettes, putting them inside his pocket to throw out later. He offered his hand to Bruce. The mud he had been fisting splattered Jason's shirt and hand, but neither of them said anything. They just looked at each other and tried to read the other’s face. Tried to peek at the abyss inside their chests, like planets gravitating towards one another but not allowed to get closer because they would collapse.

They wiped their hands on their pants and walked to the Manor’s entrance in silence. Jason saw the silhouettes of the others on the windows, the lightnings making them look like shadows against the lit-up glass.

The door stood tall and royal before them. He remembered the first time he saw it, how small he’d felt. How vulnerable. He’d always preferred the kitchen door. Before he could suggest the other door, Alfred opened it. The butler looked at Jason, waiting for his response. Jason felt Bruce change his weight from one foot to the other.

“ _Alf_ ,” Jason gasped. His bursting heart faintly aching at the memory of all those times he’d wished for Alfred to be beside him.

The butler smiled faintly in that way of his and Jason beamed, and he was clutching him in his wet, dirty arms. Alfred didn’t seem to mind. He let out a wet sob against the butler’s neck, basking in the warmth beneath his arms and the gentle hands rubbing circles on his back.

“It’s good to have you back, Master Jason.”

“It’s good to have _you_ back.” Jason laughed through the tears.

He could see the others over Alfred’s shoulder, staring at them in awe. Jason paid them no mind.

“I do hope you’re staying for dinner,” Alfred said, choked up.

“I’m staying for a while,” Jason declared, looking at the others.

He took a step back and wiped his face, nodding at Alfred and stepping in. Dick, Tim, Cassandra, Duke and Stephanie were standing there. Jason opened his mouth, ready to say something to the group, when he saw movement in the main stairs behind them.

There, walking down the stairs at a quick pace, was Damian. The child’s eyes met Jason’s and Jason felt the choked-up sound that wanted to scape his throat.

“ _Habibi_ ,” Jason said, crossing the room in quick strides and gathering the child in his arms.

Damian hugged his mid-section while Jason stroked his hair. They’d been apart barely four days, but neither of them had known how the talk with Bruce would go.

There had been a possibility of not being able to see each other in the near future.

Damian greeted him in the League’s dialect.

“Where’s Ma’am?” Jason asked, curious about their cat.

“Upstairs,” Damian shrugged, taking a step back. “Hidden in my room.”

“Atta boy.” Jason smirked at him.

“Come,” Damian beckoned him. “She’s been nervous without you.”

And Jason followed, ignoring the sets of eyes burning at his back. For now, he needed time with his family.

**Author's Note:**

> hollooooo
> 
> please comment if you liked it, or if you cried!
> 
> i'll see you in the next part of the series :)


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